‘This is not the summer of love’
Campus protests aren’t nearly as big or violent as those last century — at least not yet
In a way, the black-and-white Palestinian scarf draped over Hannah Sattler’s shoulders this week and the tie-dyed T-shirts of 1968 are woven from a common thread.
Like so many college students across the country protesting the Israel-Hamas war, Sattler feels the historic weight of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the 1960s and 70s.
“They always talked about the ’68 protest as sort of a North Star,” Sattler, 27, a graduate student of international human rights policy at Columbia University, said of the campus organisers there.
“Even the choice to take over Hamilton Hall was always the plan from the start of the encampment,” she says. “Not only because it just made a lot of sense logistically, but it also has that . . . strong historical connection with the 60s protests.”
Still, although it might be tempting to compare the nationwide campus protests to the anti-Vietnam War movement of a half century ago, Robert Cohen says that would be an overreaction.
So far, there have been no bombings, like the one in August 1970 at the University of Wisconsin that killed a postdoctoral researcher and did US$6 million worth of damage.
There has been no repeat of the infamous Kent State massacre of May 1970, when National Guard troops opened fire on protesters at the Ohio campus, killing four.
Police have cleared encampments and made more than 2000 arrests, and some, like the crackdown Thursday at UCLA, have involved violent clashes. But other actions by law enforcement, including the clearing of protesters who had occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, were carried out without incident.
Yet, to some, there is a feeling that the situation is just one hair-trigger moment away from tragedy, says Mark Naison, who took part in the sometimes violent protests at Columbia in 1968.
In many ways, this does feel like the America of what Cohen calls “the long 60s”.
In September 1970, barely five months after the Kent State tragedy, the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest delivered to Richard M. Nixon a “Letter To The American People”.
“This crisis has roots in divisions of American society as deep as any since the Civil War,” the panel wrote.
“The divisions are reflected in violent acts and harsh rhetoric and in the enmity of those Americans who see themselves as occupying opposing camps.”
Watching the gyre of emotions on campuses from Connecticut to California, those words feel as if they could have been written this week.
Even US Representative Lauren Boebert made an allusion to that earlier time.
“This is not the summer of love!” the Colorado Republican shouted through a bullhorn during a visit to chide protesters at George Washington University.
Cohen says emotions — and sheer numbers — are nowhere near the levels they reached at the height of the Vietnam era.
Another difference that has struck observers is the quick crackdown by campus authorities. In 1968, students occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall for nearly a week before authorities moved in.
Robert Korstad, who protested in the 1960s and is now a professor emeritus of public policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, does see comparisons.
Then, as now, they were protesting a violent war. And now, in addition, students have felt pervasive conflict, said Korstad, with the country’s rash of mass shootings and the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police.
Some, like Korstad, believe the campus unrest in the 60s and 70s hastened the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Many of those protesting today want their colleges and universities to divest from companies that do business with Israel or otherwise contribute to the war effort.
Students there have taken direct inspiration from MIT protests against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, including turning to the archives to study those protesters’ strategies and using some of the same slogans on their signs and setting up the encampment in the same place.